NEXT WEEK
―Mr.
Marmour will have an article of special interest to residents of
Brookline.

Though most of the Tuft college buildings are in Medford, the Somerville-Medford
line passes through the college grounds, and two boundary markers are to be
found on the campus, so that at least part of the college is in Somerville.
There are streets on the Somerville side bearing such names as Professors Row
and Latin Row. Over thirty years ago, Tufts turned out the youngest college
graduate on record―age 14. He would appear to have been the only extra-young
college graduate in America who specialized in mathematics; for, though another
boy shortly afterwards was reputed to be a mathematician, there was nothing
authentic about such reports, which were 100% pipe-dream. The Tufts graduate now
teaches mathematics; the victim of the press hoax, is unable to even understand
the subject. Case of mistaken identity.*

*

Boston is the only large city in America having a large park, unmarred by
highways of railroad tracks, adjacent to the shopping district.

*

Even Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village” is represented in our Metropolis. Over a
century age, the name of “Sweet Auburn” copied from the name of the deserted
village in Goldsmith’s poem, was given to a new real-estate addition located
between Cambridge and Watertown. But Sweet Auburn had no better luck over here
than in the poem, and soon became a real deserted village. The land was bought
by the Horticultural Society as a model cemetery, and, as such, has ever since
been known as Mount Auburn. A link is furnished in James Russell Lowell’s line
of poetry, “And I thought of a mound in Sweet Auburn.”

*

One of the important inducements which got Puritans to adopt Boston as a home
site was the presence of a spring of wonderfully pure water. This spring is no
longer to be seen, but it still flows, under our Post Office Building, and down
to the harbor. The little alley called Spring Lane, leading from Washington
Street to the Post Office, is right above the old spring.

*

The fictitious “Port of Embarkation” made up by the magazine “Life” recently for
its lessons to readers on the art of keeping army supplies moving, may have been
located on “Life’s” maps in an impossible part of the South Carolina coast, but
the outline of the main part of the imagined city was unquestionably that of
Boston.

_____________

* This is Norbert Wiener who graduated from Tufts at the age of eleven,
and entered Harvard in 1909 as a graduate student, the same year Sidis entered.
See Sidis's Transcript.